"Enter for the chance for you and a guest to attend an intimate, invitation-only performance by Booker T. and the Drive-By Truckers with special guest Bettye LaVette in New Orleans on April 23. If you are selected, you will be emailed a confirmation and details the week of the show."

"“Pound It Out,' the opening track, begins with the unaccompanied notes of a Hammond organ, an instrument whose quavering sound was integral to the records Jones made in the 1960s, both as part of Booker T & the MGs and as part of the Stax Records house band that backed Otis Redding and Sam & Dave, among many others.

Recorded in a converted movie theater in Memphis, Tenn., the hundreds of songs Jones cut for Stax were saturated in Southern grit and sweat, a sound that came to define and occasionally constrain his career. But Potato Hole, his first solo album in almost two decades, due out April 21, announces its intention to depart from that template right off the bat. Jones' opening riff is met with a thundering triple-guitar blast, courtesy of Southern rockers the Drive-By Truckers, who back Jones on all of the album's 10 tracks.

"This is my first post. I just wanted to say how The DBT's Rocked Sydney last night and was probably more of an amazing show than I even expected. Lucky enought to be only a few metres from the stage and they played every song I wanted to hear! Thanks for coming to Australia!"

"We left Mullumbimby Sunday morning and headed back to Byron for the East Coast Blues and Roots Festival. It was amazing, long (12 hours), and muddy-- but we saw excellent acts like Ruthie Foster, Blues Traveler, Drive By Truckers, State Radio, Lucinda Williams, and John Butler Trio. It was a great time, and all of the hipsters from all of Australia were there."

"These are the songs still alive in the April edition of the contest. Voting begins right after the live show on April 4 and continues through April 25. This month’s schedule is a little different for a variety of dang reasons that you’ll just have to deal with, dang it: we will eliminate 15 songs on Friday, April 10 (we’ll do the live show 24 hours earlier than usual because of Easter Holiday and Hoss’s Birthday, but a replay will air at the regular time on Saturday, April 11); we will eliminate another 15 on April 18, and we’ll name our Top 5 finalists on Saturday, April 25."

JTE: I think they cross in the simplest fashion just because musicians have always been looked at as outlaws, and somehow through history, I don’t exactly know how it happened, I don’t know how people ended up translating Johnny cash into punk rock. But it ended up happening and it was just this attitude thing when these guys were coming up back in the day you had a bunch of rough and tumble folks like Charlie Pool and Dock Boggs. The kind of characters that may have been from the hills, but they’d shoot your ass in a second. They were rough, they drank, they didn’t give a shit what they said to anybody or what anybody said to them, they were gonna do what they wanted to do. And I think you know even though Dock Boggs did use his wife as a shield in a gunfight in Bristol Tennessee, I think he pulled off punk rock a little classier than Sid Vicious did.

JI: Right. Yeah I guess you’re right, the classiness of it is a little bit different, because I know a lot of those old guys and they’re just as grizzled and just as hard as my opinion of Johnny Rotten would be, but they still seem to be kinda gentlemen about it you know.

JTE: Yeah. Yeah I think that there’s an old time feel about ‘em that still says like, when the suns out you say yes ma’am and yes sir, and when the sun goes down it’s fuck ‘em. Where in punk rock its fuck ‘em all the time.

"I got an email the other day that’s the best news I’ve had all year. The Dexateens are releasing their new album, Singlewide and for the first time ever, they’re going to tour to promote it! You probably don’t know who The Dexateens are, but in my little part of the world, they get as much play as any other band I’ve ever followed. They were my New Favorite Band back before someone at Fox pissed me off and I quit my occasionally updated and hardly read blog. They have too many releases to maintain that title, so they just fall into the category of one of My All-Time Favorite Bands Ever category."